I get lots of questions about Dr. Mary Main’s Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which showed in 1994 that only 55% of Americans have “secure attachment.” That’s already a shocker– it means 45% of us did not. [FN1] (Mary Main with her top grad student, neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Siegel, MD)
We’ve got a 52% divorce rate, round numbers make discussion easy, and in 1994 the public hadn’t even heard of the Internet. In the 20 years since, email, texting, and all that goes with them have even further trashed our ability to relate. So I did some update research, and started to use a round number of “at least 50%” for how many Americans are not securely attached.
Only after that did I learn that the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study showed in 1998 that 58% of middle class Americans had 2 or more traumatic childhood experiences. That didn’t seem likely to permit them as kids to attach well to their families. [FN2]
Trauma by definition shuts humans down to feeling attachment and love. There’s no time; our nervous system puts us into fight or flight. But as kids, that doesn’t get us out of the situation. Instead, continued stress puts our nervous system into freeze: our vagus nerve starts shutting down bodily functions, Dr. Stephen Porges has shown. [FN3] Thus the ACE Study shows that ACEs create the conditions underlying the top 10 medical causes of death in the U.S.
The more I learn about the ACE Study, the more apt that “at least 50%” number looks for how many of us are not securely attached. That means a lot of us are in trouble and don’t even know it. Step one: let’s get informed. We can’t get healing for a problem we deny exists.
Step Two: there’s good news. If we didn’t get securely attached as kids, we can develop “earned secure attachment,” brain science has shown. “It is possible to change attachment patterns, especially with the plasticity of the brain,” Dr. Main says. [FN4] READ MORE....
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